The song R.E.M. called “human and non-human”
Nothing on Automatic for the People seemed like it had any interest in commercial pop success. With the exception of ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight’, the eighth studio album from alternative rock gods R.E.M. features languid tempos, introspective writing, and little else. From the slow-burn acoustic push of ‘Drive’ to the anthemic ‘Man on the Moon’ to the beautiful balladry of ‘Nightswimming’, Automatic for the People is as muted and serious as any R.E.M. album ever was.
That kind of strange melancholy reaches a peak on ‘Everybody Hurts’, the surprising top 40 hit that wound up being the album’s most endearing track. A stark anti-suicide ode, ‘Everybody Hurts’ was so direct and simple that it might have seemed like a joke had the band not played it completely straight. The sentiments found in ‘Everybody Hurts’ made it an instant part of popular culture both for those who took it seriously and those who didn’t. For their part, the members of R.E.M. always remained proud of the track.
“I don’t remember singing it,” Michael Stipe noted in the liner notes to the 2011 compilation album Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011, “But I still kind of can’t believe my voice is on this recording. It’s very pure. This song instantly belonged to everyone except us, and that honestly means the world to me.”
‘Everybody Hurts’ was originally written by drummer Bill Berry. With only an acoustic guitar and a drum machine, Berry showed his bandmates the early draft of the song with a deliberate lack of polish. Berry wanted to make sure that the song straddled the line between natural playing and more synthetic sonic textures. “Mike (Stipe) and I cut it live with this dumb drum machine which is just as wooden as you can get,” Berry told Pulse in 1992. “We wanted to get this flow around that: human and non-human at the same time.”
“Bill brought it in, and it was a one-minute long country-and-western song,” Peter Buck observed in the liner notes to Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011. “It didn’t have a chorus or a bridge. It had the verse… it kind of went around and around, and he was strumming it. We went through about four different ideas and how to approach it and eventually came to that Stax, Otis Redding, ‘Pain in My Heart’ kind of vibe. I’m not sure if Michael would have copped that reference, but to a lot of our fans, it was a Staxxy-type thing. It took us forever to figure out the arrangement and who was going to play what, and then Bill ended up not playing on the original track. It was me and Mike and a drum machine. And then we all overdubbed.”
Berry eventually got his live acoustic drums on the final album version. ‘Everybody Hurts’ was a critical and commercial success when it was first released as a single in 1993, but once the internet came into its own, the song quickly became a shorthand for a more comedic take on depression and sadness. Still, ‘Everybody Hurts’ remained pure for R.E.M., especially as they received responses from fans who connected with the song’s hopeful message.
“It saved a few. People have told me. And I love hearing that,” Stipe later told Mojo. “That’s for me, that’s my Oscar, that’s my gold on a shelf right there… that something we did impacted someone’s life in such a profound way. That’s a beautiful thing.”
Check out ‘Everybody Hurts’ down below.
